festivals
Andrew Todd
The vast Avignon Festival is not a neatly curated sequence of works which can be experienced - like certain art biennales or the Proms - as if on a conveyor belt. There are 50 productions in the official “In” during three weeks, and more than a thousand shows - mostly dross - in the “Off” fringe. The festival’s directors - Vincent Baudriller and Hortense Archambault - are probably the only people to “get” the whole thing, but even they are bound to be surprised because some works evolve down to the wire (Romeo Castellucci’s presentation, for one, bears scant relation to his programme notes or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Iceland’s kings of heavy metal Momentum are launching into an assault called “The Creator of Malignign Metaphors”. It’s broad daylight and they’re playing about 10 meters from the kitchen window of a suburban-looking house. The stage is sited on an AstroTurf football pitch, with one of the goals pushed to the side of it. On the opposite side, kids are shimmying down a blow-up slide. Very little about G! conforms with the standard festival experience.G! is the Faroe Islands’ – The Føroyar - annual celebration of its own music. The chocolate-box coastal village of Syðrugøta is the host ( Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Way up in the mountains of northern Italy sits a small spa town called Porretta Terme. For many visitors it is the resort’s healing waters that brings them here. Yet for others it is the healing music – once a year the Porretta Soul Music Festival is held across the second to last weekend in July. Here veterans of American soul music take the stage, often performing their only European show of the year (and, sometimes, many years). I’d heard rumours of Porretta for several years – it has existed since 1988 – and having missed elusive genius Swamp Dogg at last year’s festival meant I went Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Can this really be only an afternoon’s travelling away from traffic-choked London? I’m waist-deep in wild blue lupins on a verdant Swiss mountain looking for a concert hall.A cow’s bell nearby is slightly frustrating - beyond the lupins, I guess, is another steep field with the track I need; a paraglider high above me is out of earshot, though they’d be able to see the hall better than I can. I’m trying to get to a masterclass by that captivating operatic soprano of the past, Ileana Cotrubas, who is here as one of the Verbier Festival’s habitual stars-of-stars helping out rising talents. Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Following the three home-grown opera productions, in come the visitors. And so we come to the “other” Figaro, the one by the 18th-century Portuguese composer, Marcos Portugal. This being Buxton and the visiting company being Bampton Classical Opera, fellow-travellers in reviving neglected later 18th-century works, Mozart would be just too, well, common. It’s not all that long ago that we had the “other” Barber of Seville, the Paisiello version here. And we have had several helpings of Cimarosa over the years, from The Secret Marriage to The Italian Girl in London.Marking the 250th anniversary Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I have to be honest - I didn’t go to very much of Nova. Suffice to say I’d put my name down to review it and then fate threw a house move into the mix in the same week. Nevertheless, relatively undaunted, I planned to head down to the Pulborough site in West Sussex, only 20 miles from where I live, taking my two daughters along. Then I lost my driving license. And then it started raining and didn’t stop.While I’ve no truck whatsoever with the British media’s obsession with festivals being a misery of mud, dragging children to them in bad weather can be very unrewarding (especially, I reckoned Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No sooner had the Olympic torch been run out of town than in rushed the cavalcade of opera singers, musicians, actors, dancers and literary talkers for the start of the 34th Buxton Festival. Leading them, so to speak, was Stephen Barlow, the new Artistic Director. Nothing daunted, he decided to take up the baton for the opening night.The tradition here is to surprise us with works from opera’s old curiosity shop. Even if we’ve heard of them, we may well not have seen them, sometimes prompting the ironical “I wonder why?” Not the case with Intermezzo, but we have the double bill of Sibelius’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Brand-free, eschewing sponsorship, and letting kids in for free, the Hop Farm Festival in Paddock Wood, Kent, has risen steadily in stature to become one of the major fixtures on the UK festival circuit. If the festival is young, most of its audience and stars are of a certain age. Last year saw Morrisey, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Manu Chao headline, while Prince played his only UK show there.This year the emphasis was on great English eccentrics like Ray Davies, Suede, the Psychedelic Furs and, enjoying his newly hip status, Gary Numan, while the likes of White Denim, Race Horses, The Read more ...
Nigel Williamson
Bob Dylan once described himself as ''just a song and dance man''. If the phrase was intended to debunk our veneration of him as the voice of a generation and to imply that he's just an old-fashioned entertainer in the great showbiz tradition, devotees have never believed him and have carried on seeking clues to the meaning of life in his work, campaigning for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and generally treating his every utterance as if he's the Oracle.Yet at the Hop Farm deep in rural Kent on a cool, moonlit Saturday night, the serious artist was finally transformed into song Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Some people go on holiday to relax on a beach. Others to trek through a glorious landscape. Or to explore magnificent architecture/extravagant nightclubs. Myself, well, I’m a musical tourist. Which often means I’m in rather blighted states. I’ve spent more time in Mississippi than New York, regularly returned to Romania yet barely know France. So when the offer came to attend a musical festival in La Réunion I didn’t have to think twice.La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, rarely attracts UK attention – beyond when Piton de la Fournaise, Réunion’s very active volcano (pictured below), Read more ...
Jasper Rees
To each their own Hay. The Roman encampment that is the modern-day literary festival, circled by pantechnicons and trending in the Twittersphere, looks very much like a monomaniacal content provider for all comers. Astroturf walkways deliver the cagouled hundreds and thousands to events in tents with clockwork regularity. But the reality is, of course, that no two experiences of Hay are alike. A bit like snowflakes.Talking of which, the one common denominator to every event in my two and half a days on site alluded in some shape or form to the weather. As the winds crack its cheeks outside, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s one thing for UK Border Control to turn Heathrow’s Arrivals into a giant theme-park queue, but it’s quite another when they start messing with our music. Paperwork issues yesterday saw one Japanese and two Korean members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra denied entry to the UK, leaving Ton Koopman and his band too under-staffed to attempt their planned Brandenburg Concerto. Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.One of the Read more ...